I have been thinking about the 4th of July camping trip I’m going on, and decided I needed some homebrew to take with. I stopped by my local homebrew store and picked up the ingredients for a summer wheat beer.

I have made this recipe before but I changed a few things this time. I made a new hop schedule using 4 ounces of hops and I’m trying White Labs WLP007 Dry English Yeast this time. I’m hoping to get a drier beer that lets the hops shine through. I’m also planning to dry hop with 1 ounce of Amarillo hops.

Everything went well during brew day. The boil and hop additions went well, I even remembered the whirfloc tablet, though this beer will probably never clear. At the 60 minute mark I removed from the heat and gave one last stir. I let it sit with the cover on for just over 5 minutes before moving to the sink for the water bath. I have noticed since the outside temps have come up that it takes a bit longer to cool the wort down. I add ice packs at the 15 minute mark and they seem to help.

The wort was cooled down to 70 degrees. I wanted to see if the hops would settle out, so I left it sit on the counter for a while. Looks like that will take longer than I want to wait. I poured the wort through my strainer into the fermenter trying to get as much hop sediment out as possible. I then topped it off to 5.2 gallons and stirred for a few minutes, next adding the new yeast. I sealed up the fermenter and moved it to a dark place. It was bubbling just before the 24 hour mark. The krausening settled down after two more days. Now it’s up to the yeast to do the hard work.

This should be bottled and conditioned just in time for my camping trip.